


Dark Horse

by talkingtothesky



Category: Life on Mars (UK)
Genre: F/F, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-05
Updated: 2010-10-05
Packaged: 2017-10-19 10:51:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/200039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/talkingtothesky/pseuds/talkingtothesky
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ruth Tyler is no stranger to sleeping with strangers, Annie discovers...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dark Horse

**Author's Note:**

> This is evil!Annie/Ruth, femslash and darkfic. Possibly quite disturbing in places. You have been warned.

Annie’s very good at getting people to trust her. She presents herself as an open, honest, kind-hearted sort of girl, and she plays the role to perfection. But when it’s needed, when a piece of scum that should have been convicted gets off scot-free she’s not averse to handing out her own kind of justice, while remaining absolutely above suspicion.

She’s particularly good at getting Sam Tyler to trust her. She’s got him telling her things about the future, about his life back ‘home’, most if not all of which could have him committed if she wanted. But why should she? It’s much more fun to watch him rant and rave at the ceilings and cry on her shoulder when he’s hurt. She _loves_ to watch him cry. He’s so child-like, beneath all the confidence and leather jacket-as-barrier and hardworking exterior. It’s never a mothering instinct, and certainly not a romantic one. When he cries, she wants to tear him apart and make him _bleed_ , find the biting point and _squeeze_ until he snaps like a guilty man.

And she knows he’s guilty. Guilty of being a lunatic and a pervert, to boot.

The night he tells her is the same night he hovers around her barstool in the pub, awkwardly making conversation and ducking behind her every time the Guv walks past. Eventually she asks what the hell they’ve been fighting about this time. Instead of shrugging and letting the enquiry pass him by like a smart man would, Sam shifts, puts a tentative hand to his hip and says: “Not fighting, exactly.”

Annie looks across at Gene and reinterprets his smug smirk as something else _entirely_. Disgust flows through her at the thought of the two of them: Hunt cheating on his wife for a crackpot like Sam Tyler and Sam letting him, despite not wanting to be here, despite wanting more than anything to be _home_. It’ll end in tears, for both of them. And Annie will _love_ it when Sam runs into her arms. So she can tease and squeeze and lead him on some more.

But it doesn’t stop there. She only has to wait until one day a man named Vic Tyler walks into their lives and makes Sam rave worse than ever. He takes her to his parents’ house, and she listens with infinite patience (and inward savage glee) as he pouts and paces and _begs_ her to believe. And that’s when she says she’ll get him help. She still won’t, of course, but it serves to shut him up long enough for her to make her own enquiries, find out a few more secrets about the Tyler ‘family’ via her own contacts, satisfy a curiosity, a stirring in her gut.

She finds Ruth Tyler. Gains her trust, oh so easily, and how like her son she is, ready to spill all about her family after she’s had a couple of drinks and subtle promptings to help Annie put her husband in the clear. She learns of the affairs, long trips away, meagre funds, the things Ruth’s done to keep her child in clothes and bread for a few weeks longer. Ruth Tyler is no stranger to sleeping with strangers, Annie discovers, and the stirring in her gut gets just that little bit stronger.

Until the urge to claim and conquer something so precious to Sam - to widen the cracks of his already fragile mind - is as powerful a desire as the feeling she gets moments before the light flickers from a murderer’s eyes.

It’s too easy to manipulate, to take and take and take from Ruth. She gives a little back in the end, of course, a ten pound note left on a bedside table when she makes herself scarce at three in the morning, leaving Ruth curled and bruised and sleeping sated in her tumbledown house.

And Ruth _loves_ it, she notes, when Annie flicks her tongue so cruelly over her delicate flesh, when she tears and probes and scissors into welcoming wet heat. There’s a latent primal need there that surprises them both, and Annie feels some of her ice-cold control slipping towards the end. Ruth _is_ beautiful, and her tainted selfless innocence is perhaps more respectable than her son’s self-serving sins.

Annie doesn’t regret it, not one bit. And afterwards, when Vic Tyler has been silenced thanks to righteous squeezing hands about his throat, Annie returns to Ruth’s bed and to her life, helping unseen to bring up a boy she will later despise.


End file.
